Washington (AFP) – US President Donald Trump plans to take his economic message on the road, a White House official said Thursday, a week after voters hammered his Republican party in elections where affordability emerged as a key issue. The senior official told AFP that Trump’s domestic travel “will continue to ramp up,” following a CNN report that the administration was weighing up more travel and speeches to seek to boost his standing on the subject.
The billionaire president has faced pressure from the right wing of his party, including firebrand ally Marjorie Taylor Greene, to spend more time on the “home front” instead of foreign trips and peace negotiations. “Cleaning up Joe Biden’s inflation and economic disaster has been a top focus for President Trump since Day One,” White House spokesman Kush Desai said in a statement. Desai added that Trump was “implementing a robust economic agenda” to lower prices on essentials like gas and eggs and pointed to an announcement last week of a deal to lower the prices of some weight-loss drugs.
Trump, 79, has bristled at suggestions that he is vulnerable on the issue of affordability, after Democrats won elections in New Jersey and Virginia, and Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York. “The country has never been in better shape,” he said as he signed a bill to end the longest government shutdown in US history on Wednesday.
But in recent days, he has appeared to lean into the issue, unveiling a series of plans including a possible $2,000 dividend for Americans funded by his sweeping tariffs on other countries. Inflation has been a recurring problem for US presidents since the Covid pandemic, with Biden also having hit the road in a failed bid to persuade Americans that his economic fixes were working.
© 2024 AFP
